Sunday, April 3, 2011

Strava, running versus cycling

Strava has really gained traction among the San Francisco Bay area cycling community. In some group rides, in particular competitive non-racer groups like Mission Cycling and SF2G, typically 3/4 of the riders will upload rides, all the more remarkable considering it requires an expensive GPS-enabled cycle computer (although the price of entry gets lower with each new generation of Garmins, as the users dump their old units).

Here's the Marincello trail page for cycling (which includes both mountain biking and road biking). As I write this, 99 users have uploaded rides which include this segment, ridden a total of 567 times. The top time, by David Beldon, was with a VAM of 1194 meters/hour, quite impressive for a gravelly dirt fire road. I'm ranked 24th.

But Strava isn't just about cycling. Basically any activity which involves transport by human power is compatible. Strava activities can be categorized in a number of areas, and of course running is one of these. The Marin Headlands trails, every weekend day are full of trail runners. This is an absolute hotbed of trail running in the United States, and the Marin Headlands are a favorite for both training and racing.

2 comments:

+3. There are lots of options for sites to upload my activities to, all of which have a few features I like. None of which have all the features I want. Plus Three wins for me, just on the feel-good aspect of earning $$$ for causes. Apologies if you've covered this elsewhere in your excellent blog.

Thanks for the suggestion! Others have suggested +3. I think the user-defined segment definition of Strava is fantastic: I don't think +3 has anything that good (could be wrong).

I do note that in my favorite running grounds, San Francisco and the Marin Headlands, I'm seeing more and more times show up. It's getting harder and harder to get KOMs! So things seem to be picking up for Strava with the wheel-less crowd.